So, yesterday President Obama screwed up traffic here in Los Angeles so he could attend a(nother) fund-raiser at the California ATM, hobnobbing over $1,000 a plate meals with the Hollywood glitterati at the home of actress and Obama fan-girl Gwyneth Paltrow. As Politico reports, her introduction of the President was cringe-worthy on several levels:

Gwyneth Paltrow wants President Barack Obama to know: she’s just like everyone else.

She makes $16 million per movie, sure, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not worried about Obama getting equal pay legislation through Congress.

At a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee held at her house in Brentwood Thursday evening, she called the issue “very important to me as a working mother.”

In front of a crowd that included fellow actors Julia Roberts (who took her picture in front of the presidential limo on her way out) and Bradley Whitford (that’s Josh Lyman from “The West Wing”), Paltrow told Obama she is “one of your biggest fans, if not the biggest.”

Reminding Obama that she hosted an expat fundraiser for him in London when she was living there, Paltrow described Obama as a president who would be studied for generations, and a role model for everyone of this generation.

“It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass,” she told the crowd.

Because we all know “working moms” who struggle with making at least $16,000,000 per year, live in huge mansions in Brentwood and Bel Air, and have to get by with only a few dozen maids, nannies, groundskeepers, and cooks. Not to mention personal assistants.

Life must be hell for poor Gwyneth.

But that was nothing compared to the second highlighted statement, in which the “working mother” wishes Obama had absolute power. She yearns not for a constitutional chief executive, whose job is to enforce the laws Congress passes in an evenhanded manner. Nope, what she wants is a king, a caliph, an emperor, a dictator… a fuhrer.

Yeah, I went there. I’m not accusing Paltrow of consciously (1) being a fascist, liberal or otherwise; I don’t believe she’s bright enough or cares to really understand or care about such things. But she makes it clear that fascist leadership, in which all power is vested in a Leader who embodies the will of the nation and knows what’s best for it, is what she wants. Democracy is just too messy, and there are too many unenlightened people pushing their own wrongheaded agendas, in spite of what Gwyneth knows to be right. And so we need to get rid of it and just give Obama all the power he needs, because Gwyneth is sure Barack will only do good with it, progressive superhero that he is.

No, she’s not a liberal fascist. She’s just a useful idiot. A beautiful, smiling, and vapid useful idiot.

This is why the Left cannot be taken seriously on constitutional matters: they don’t even understand the basics. Via Power Line:

Bill Gertz has a lengthy and fascinating piece in the Washington Free Beacon about what he calls the Obama administration’s failure “to wage ideological war against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) terrorists.” Gertz attributes the failure to “fears that attacking [ISIS’s] religious philosophy will violate the constitutional divide between church and state.”

It seems difficult to believe that the First Amendment explains Obama’s unwillingness to acknowledge, for example, that the Islamic State is Islamic. Gertz cites James Glassman, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Glassman seems to rely mainly on what he hears coming out of the State Department.

For the record, here’s what the 1st Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I don’t see anything in there about “the government may not criticize the religious doctrine of an enemy organization,” do you? Perhaps our constitutional law professor-president can explain it to us.

Gertz calls this a “surrender in the war of ideas,” and he is right. It’s a pathetic bit of hand-waving to hide the fact that the administration desperately does not want to deal with the Islamic doctrine cited by ISIS as the justification for its jihad. For whatever reason –political correctness, a leftist reluctance to criticize “victims of colonialism,” a fear of upsetting allied Muslim states, or even a secular inability to deal with minds operating on a religious paradigm– the Obama administration (and, to a lesser extent, the Bush administration before it) will go to any lengths to deny the truth: we are in a global conflict with an Islamic supremacist/revivalist movement that, while having many sometimes fractious elements, is united by a largely common and mainstream understanding of Islamic texts and doctrines. And until and if (1) we can get imams willing to go public with their criticism in Islamic terms of the doctrinal arguments of the jihadists, we will continue to surrender in this war of ideas and the jihadists will continue to attract recruits.

Footnote:

(1) Which is problematic, because a) I think the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and other jihad groups have a very good understanding of Islamic doctrine, and imams critical of them have trouble finding counter-arguments; and b) critics of the jihad who do come forward often put their lives at real risk.

My ancestors left Ireland to escape oppressive tyrants, so I can well imagine what they’d be thinking now at hearing the news that an Irish city wants to erect a statue to murderous tyrant Che Guevara:

A major and innovative monument to the Irish-Argentinean revolutionary, guerilla, doctor, writer, and politician Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, has taken a step closer to becoming a reality this week.

The Galway Advertiser understands that City Hall’s arts officer James Harrold will commission a scale model of the proposed monument to be made. This will then be presented to the Galway City Council’s Working Group on Public Arts for consideration, and later city manager Joe O’Neill for final approval. The approval of city councillors may also need to be sought.

The idea to erect a monument to Che Guevara comes from a proposal made by Labour councillor Billy Cameron, an ardent admirer of the revolutionary, that a monument be erected in Galway and that the project be undertaken in conjunction with the Cuban and Argentinean embassies to Ireland.

The proposed monument has been designed by Simon McGuinness and it is understood that it will feature the iconic image of Che created by the Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, commonly seen on posters and T-shirts.

Pardon me while I hurl. Billy Cameron is either an ignorant fool, or he approves of Guevara’s crimes. Regardless, he’s a disgrace. Here’s an example of the man Galway would honor:

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.

Hey! I’ve got an idea for Cameron and the other Galway commissars councilors! Don’t stop with Che Guevara, honor his soul mates, too: Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Josef Stalin, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Kim Jong-Il! Why, there are so many you could build an entire park dedicated to psychopathic, murdering bast… er… “gentlemen.”

There should be no room in a beautiful city like Galway, in a free country like Ireland, to honor a mass murdering sociopathic racist Communist whose aim in life was to destroy the very freedoms and rights the Irish have struggled so hard to attain throughout their history. To build this monument, with the aim of making it a tourist attraction, is an insult to the very ideals of the Irish nation and the city of Galway.

Ah, Dear Leader, Sun of Socialism, Great Man Who Descended From Heaven!! (1) How it must warm the cockles of your Stalinist heart to see how your juche message of “more brandy,” kidnapping filmmakers to make movies for you, drug smuggling, and counterfeiting resonates with the followers you left behind… especially in Occupy Wall Street.

While the following video was taken last October, it’s yet a fitting tribute to the memory of the sociopathic midget visionary leader whose objectives meshed so well with those of the Occupiers… so far as they can articulate them or even figure out what they are.

In it, a man who lived a large part of his life in Soviet Russia asks a couple of Occu-dolts what the difference between North and South Korea is. Their answer? There’s no unemployment and everyone is paid a fair wage in the North! Income equality! Yes!

These, my friends, are the fighters for the ninety-nine percent:

Of course, it’s easy to have full employment when everyone is a slave of the state given a job by the government, and there’s no doubt that those “fair wages” enabled everyone in the DPRK to knock down $700,000 of cognac per year. Such is the nature of the worker’s paradise. Pay no attention to the narrator’s mention of cannibalism, or the vicious imperialist rumors of mass starvation (which may be happening again). A vast gulag of prison camps that hold multiple generations of whole families? LIES!!

Because, like, you know… Dude! Socialism is just fairer. Okay?

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised at these useful idiots; the phenomenon isn’t new. Many progressives in 1920s and 1930s America thought Bolshevism and Italian Fascism offered useful lessons that could be applied in America to make a better society (2). Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s Russia. The 1960s anti-war movement and the 1980s “nuclear freeze” campaign were nurtured and used by the KGB and allied intelligence agencies. And in the current war with jihadist Islam, way too many people think they’re serving a noble cause by siding with the enemy.

Footnotes:
(1) Really, you have to look at the list of titles bestowed on Kim Jong-Il. What it says about Kim’s egomania is both screamingly funny and pathetic. I’m sure our fourth-greatest president has it bookmarked for future reference. (h/t J.S. Treviño)
(2) And not just low-level flunkies. General Hugh S. Johnson, a member of FDR’s “brain trust” and the head of the National Recovery Administration, so admired Mussolini and Italian fascism that he asked that copies of a tract by Benito’s favorite economist be distributed to the Cabinet.

My God, only a clown could say the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization. That person becomes a dangerous clown, however, when he is also the president’s Director of National Intelligence:

At a House Intelligence Committee hearing earlier in the day, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) questioned Clapper about the threat posed by the group. Clapper replied by suggesting that the Egyptian part of the Brotherhood is not particularly extreme and that the broader international movement is hard to generalize about.

“The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’…is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam,” Clapper said. “They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera…..In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.”

Wow, that is just monumentally ignorant. Question for DNI Clapper: About that overarching agenda, do the words “civilization jihad” sound “secular” to you? Or how about this quote from the writings of one of the Brotherhood’s recent leaders?

“Allah is our goal, the Prophet is our leader, the Quran is our constitution, the Jihad is our way, and the Death for Allah is our most exalted wish.”

Yeah, I’d say that’s largely secular. I’d also say our national security is in great hands with General Clapper, but that would be a lie, too.

NOTE: Right after I started writing this, Politico updated their article (first link, above) to say Clapper was backing away from his statement, and FOX reports the White House is contradicting him. Sorry, too late. That horse named “Useful Idiot” has already left the barn.

I used to like Tom Friedman’s writings on world affairs, but in recent years I’ve realized he’s nothing but an anti-democratic ass. His latest mental flatus is his fervent wish that America could be like Communist China – but just for a day!

Well, David, [our political system has] been decimated. It’s been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don’t like where you’re going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control—really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that’s really what, what it’s come down to. So I don’t—I, I—I’m worried about this, it’s why I have fantasized—don’t get me wrong—but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don’t want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

The point of democracy, Tom, is that it allows for a compromise among competing interests that can be agreed to and accepted by a majority of citizens. By nature that won’t be a perfect solution, but it will have the benefit of having legitimacy. (Want to see the opposite in action? Look at how strongly ObamaCare is being rejected after being shoved down our throats by an authoritarian majority.) Your wise, oligarchic leadership in the Forbidden City can only gain acceptance for its measures because, in the end, it has a monopoly of force and the will to use it.

Your fantasy is sickening, but I guess commanding the peasants to do your will is easy to imagine when you live in your own ivory tower.